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Addonics NAS 3.0 Adapter Review

Well, I had high hopes for this little thing. It seems easy enough – connect you USB drive to the NAS 3.0; connect the NAS 3.0 to your router; tada you now have a network drive that you can reach from all your networked computers. Well, it didn’t go that well for me. I connected my NTFS formatted 1TB Fantom drive to the USB port on the NAS 3.0 adapater. I could reach the web interface and see that it said ‘No drive found’. Disconnect, reconnect, same thing. I tried my FAT32 formatted 350GB external drive. Same thing. I tried my 1GB USB memory stick. Same thing. Then I tried connecting my drives to the printer port. All of them worked. Unfortunately when you connect a drive to the printer port it only allows read-only access to the drive. Fail!

I called tech support and was routed around several times before leaving a message. I kept calling and eventually reached a person. He diagnosed it as defective and transferred me to sales.

At this point my options were to cross ship a new product meaning they would charge me for a second product and then refund me once I shipped mine back OR return the item and have them ship me a new one OR return the item and give up. I gave up.

Some observations:

The UI is easy to use and basically intuitive

The device is very small and comes with a network cable and power cable

The drive access just worked fine when in read-only printer port mode

The instructions that come with the device are pretty good

The company is very small (~17 people). Usually this means great service like – oh, sorry it doesn’t work we’ll ship you a new one asap and you can discard the defective one we just sent you. Instead they wanted to charge me for a 2nd one or have me wait for my return to go through before sending me a new one

The reviews of the 2.0 were sketchy. Most sites don’t even have reviews of the 3.0. That should have tipped me off to potential quality issues.

I hope my product was just defective and that most of the NAS 3.0 adapters they sell work. I would like little companies like this to succeed selling a useful product.

This is the 2nd NAS adapter type device I’ve tried. Someone please make a non-crappy NAS adapter – there is a market for one!! I know because I keep wasting money returning products that don’t work.